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How a Pediatrics Group Improves Care With ShoreTel Connect ONSITE

Good communication is at the heart of every doctor-patient relationship. It’s also the lifeblood of busy healthcare practices – especially when they’re growing across several locations. Kids Plus Pediatrics, with three locations and nearly 100 employees, initially began the search for a phone system to accommodate new offices. But in the process, it gained much more: a unified communications platform that provided the ability to deliver a higher quality of patient care.

“When we were considering transitioning to a newer phone system, the most important requirement was scalability,” said Christian Lowry, chief information director at KPP. “We went from one office to two offices in the period of about a decade. The following year we opened up another office and there’s a good chance that we’ll be opening a fourth,”

Because doctors, nurses, staff and patients are all critical points in health conversations, practices like KPP often discover that a unified communications platform can help them improve the patient experience while increasing efficiency and productivity at the same time.

To achieve that, KPP installed ShoreTel Connect ONSITE, which unifies team communication to improve collaboration among the office’s doctors, nurses and administrative staff. With UC features such as instant messaging, audio and Web conferencing, video calling and Web desktop sharing, communications are quick and easy – regardless of where staff members are in separate locations or across the hall from one another.

For example, the ShoreTel Mobility feature solves the challenge of tracking down personnel in three locations. Employees simply dial an extension to reach a colleague on their mobile phone, wherever they are.

In addition, the system’s flexibility allows the team to manage high-volume call periods more effectively. With the ability to track identify peak call times, the organization has realized huge staffing efficiencies.

“As a CFO, I appreciate the ability to monitor and to optimize our workflow. We’re able to take a busy division, like triage, and now have up-to-date, up-to-the-minute analytics on call volume, productivity, and wait times,” explained Albert Wolfe, chief financial officer and a pediatrician. “When we have a sudden spike in phone calls, we can immediately bring in staff to man the phones and take calls. Once the call volume settles back down, they can be reassigned to other duties. We’ve been able to flex our staff to meet variable demands, which we never had the ability to do before.”

You might expect better a system with such flexibility and scalability to come with a higher price tag. But the total cost of ownership of KPP’s ShoreTel system is the lowest of any vendor the practice evaluated. In fact, KPP anticipates that ShoreTel Connect ONSITE will save it about 10 percent over five years compared to Microsoft Link, Avaya, and Cisco solutions.

“If someone were to ask me about ShoreTel, I would tell them that it is the system that allowed us to provide exceptional care with exceptional efficiency at an exceptionally low cost,” said Wolfe.